A new elementary school planned for the Appoquinimink School District clears a key hurdle.
Middletown’s Planning and Zoning Commission got a look at preliminary site plans for Green Giant Elementary School at their June meeting. Situated on 29 acres, the 94,000 square foot building will provide space for 840 students in grades 1-5.
As planned, the school building and its parking areas will take up about half of the site. The rest of the land is being held in reserve for a potential early childhood center to come later. The plan also protects vulnerable land on the site’s border, according to Christopher Duke, an engineer with Becker Morgan Group.
“There are some protected resources on the shared property line with Chapel Creek, some trees that you see there, wetland areas, some floodplain area, which the development footprint avoids,” he said.
Much of Duke’s presentation to the commission centered on parking and traffic, a sometimes vexing concern for drivers during student drop-off and pickup times. To help manage traffic flow, the site plan proposes two entrances, one for buses and staff leading to a back parking lot, and another for drop-off and pickup, as well as visitors, leading to a parking and queuing area in front of the building. That area was designed to keep traffic from backing up onto Green Giant Road, Duke said.
“There's about 1,000 feet of available queuing space for vehicles, just single stack. There is room for double stacking as well, so that would be about 2,000 feet available for car stacking, which is pretty significant,” Duke said. “So that was one of the primary goals that we sought to accomplish in laying this out.”
To further help ease traffic concerns, the school district will also make improvements to Green Giant Road itself as part of construction, Duke said.
“If you've driven Green Giant Road lately, it's not improved. It's not really suitable for two-way traffic,” Duke said. “So this project will be making road improvements, widening the lanes to accommodate 11-foot travel lanes in both directions as well as five-foot shoulders. There will be a right turn lane and a left turn lane at the main entrance for the student drop-offs and the visitors.”
The project will also flatten out a sharp curve in front of the school and add connecting shared-use paths to neighboring developments.
Planning and Zoning Commission members unanimously approved the preliminary site plans, which now head to the Mayor and Council for a vote on Monday.
The school is expected to open in 2029.
